~It's all about the fanfic~

Otherwise known as the time I tried to draw Benedict’s eye while it was especially green. How are his eyes even real??

My apologies for the messy eyebrow.

Prompt list by the incredible @bluebellofbakerstreet, without whom we’d all be lost.

Happy Pride Month!!

When Sherlock got back from Serbia, he fully intended on telling John how he'd survived the fall, why he'd gone away in the first place, and what he'd done while he was alone out there.

However, when he arrived back in London and saw how deeply hurt John was, how angry--he didn't. And it bothers us as the audience because we're like, BUT HE DID IT FOR YOU, JOHN. TELL HIM, SHERLOCK, AND HE'LL FORGIVE YOU.

The problem is, Sherlock realizes that John *needs* to be angry, and that he deserves to be. If he confesses everything, John will feel like an ass for being angry--even if he can't help it, still, on some level. He'd internalize the pain, hate himself for his bitterness, and do untold damage to his own psyche. John has stomped on his own emotions quite a bit in life already; he needs the catharsis of lashing out this time.

So Sherlock demonstrates a level of emotional intelligence he long ago tucked away, and stays silent. To come out and play the martyr would undermine the whole purpose of what he'd done for John, and all the love that was behind his actions. He just shuts up and takes it.

That's all the evidence we need to know how Sherlock truly feels about John.

Ok, so yesterday was a day. 

I am still reeling of a lot of it, which is why I have not been able to do a transcription of the panel (although the ones I’ve reblogged, made by other people, are very accurate and their only “fault” is not being in my head to know why I had some troubles translating Guillermo’s long answers as he spoke too quickly and too passionately so I had to paraphrase rather than translate literally as I did with the shorter answers, and at some points, I admit my short term memory may have failed me)

I am trying to get the panel off the facebook page to put it on my youtube (With permission from Harlecon’s organizer, Harleyquinnarts, whom you should all follow in Instagram and follow Harlecon on facebook because she’s amazing and made this possible by giving us the space to have the panel. BTW, I have heard that there IS a version already on youtube? If it is, please, please, please, put a link back to Harlecon on it, yes? These small cons deserve all our support)

I am ALSO trying to contact Adrian Fogarty, the dubbing director (NOT the translator, as some people are mis-reporting) who is, in the end, the one who has the answers as to where the hell the “Me too” came from.

Which is the missreporting I;ve seen going around, and which I need to adress.

During the panel, Mr. Rojas went from talking about the “Original” Script to the “DUB” Original Script without making it obvious that there was a different. Understand, for MOST actors, when they talk about the Original Script, they’re NOT talking about the Original English Script. They don’t get that. They get the Original TRANSLATED script, which can be then FURTHER changed by them or the director in order to fit cadence, and lip sync. 

And yes, we come again to my old nemesis, lip sync.

So he said that the original script said “Me Too”, as a reply to Cas’s “I love you”, and THEN Alejandro Fogarty, who has a TON of experience adapting on the fly, and is a very respected dubbing director, changed it to “And I you,Cas” because it fit better Dean’s lip movements.

This DOESN’T mean that Fogarty ADDED the Me Too. IT WAS on the Original DUB Script that Guillermo was reading.

He said that Dean didn’t reciprocate Castiel’s words too, but that was AFTER he said he didn’t HEAR what Dean originally said (Which, granted, could be him misremembering as he admitted he had a bad short term memory). This is not to say that he lied when he said Dean didn’t reciprocate, but that that’ts the reason why two different versions of what he said may be running around. This was when I said that then we had to ask Fogarty about the origin of the dub script “Me Too” as he’d probably be the one who knows.

He also said that while it was a surprise, that the writers had been very subtle creating the story between Dean and Castiel, and that it made SENSE. 

There are a few things I could say here about voice actor culture, but I won’t as it could muddy the issue and I want to wait until I finish the transcription.

What he corrected from my previous assumptions was that there was no Warner Bros quality control. They finish dubbing, then send it to air and as far as HE knows, there’s no WB exec checking the files. He admitted he might be wrong on that, but it’s more probable that he’s right. So IF the “Me too” was added, there would be no final check to stop it. HOWEVER, there has been no request to RE-Dub the line, so we can assume that, now that the horse is out of the barn, WB and CW don’t really care that, in Mexico and LataM, Dean Winchester is bisexual, canonically.

Which brings us back to the REAL question: Where did that Me Too came from?

Now, I want to make clear this I DON’T BELIEVE THERE’S A BIG CW CONSPIRACY TO KEEP DEAN STRAIGHT. What I do believe is that, due to a bunch of mismanagement of the series, PR, confusion of what their demography is, old-boys club mentality AND good ol’ network censorship, they may have ended up accidentally creating the ILLUSION of one.

And to be honest, I preffer to know the ACTUAL truth, which could very well be a rogue dub director (Which, if you check my previous posts, was a possibility I raised, that if there HAD been a rogue dub translator, the director HAD to be on it too), or a different audio version sent from the US.

I’ve seen script captures from the Original English Script that were leaked, and there Dean doesn’t reply ANYTHING. Not “Me too”, not “Don’t do this, CAs”. HE just goes 404,File not found, Being Loved by an angel, doesn’t compute.

So we know that DEan’s answer in english was Ad libbed by Jensen. 

However, we also know that Jensen had to re-record some lines. 

So he could’ve ad-libbed again, something different (Either by choice, or by the director’s request. I frankly don’t know nor care. I just assume that there were two different readings and the “wrong” one was sent to the Latam Translator. Wrong here to mean “not the one that aired in the US”)

And the only way we’re going to get closer to which was it, is asking the dub director, which is what I am trying to do. And I do hope that by now, you trust me enough to know that, IF the answer was “Oh, yeah, we decided that it was more logical” , I’ll tell you straight (Or, you know, organize another panel so that you hear it from the horse’s mouth just as I did with Guillermo Rojas)

Also, yes, Guillermo didn’t say the words “I ship Destiel” or “I am a Heller”. However, he DID say that the ending of the arc of Dean and Castiel having a love story was the closing of the series, that Dean reciprocating Cas’s feelings made it make sense and that it was beautiful. So he is a heller, in spirit if not in name.

I know that it’s long, and probably sort of dry, but it is informative. There’s no “rogue” anything in this situation. It all comes down to what the contractual stipulations are re: what has to be done in translation in terms of staying true to the script. There’s flexibility there; there has to be, because one language doesn’t usually translate super precisely to another. Which means that what happens in a dub and how those decisions should be seen after the fact (i.e. who deserves the blame) comes down to a few things:

1. Whether the dub script (the one in English, to be translated by the dub studio into the second language) was still “in production” (which means further changes might be requested from the studio after the episode is completely done being edited by Warner) or not at the time it was handed over to be translated. If so, you theoretically *could* end up with two different versions of the show, but the dub studio would be in big trouble if they effed up and sent a super different version to air by mistake than was meant to be sent. (I don’t just mean like, variations in word choice. I mean different footage etc.)

2. Whether Warner requested that the translated script be sent to them for approval (which, they would likely feel they shouldn’t *need* to if they were using a reputable company to do their dubs, because…those dub studios are only sinking themselves if they fail. And that shouldn’t happen. The network and studio likely have a very established relationship and have done this process enough times that they wouldn’t expect to have to babysit; if the translators had questions they could always ask Warner for clarification. Plus there are, again, contractual things that should stipulate which sorts of changes are acceptable. More on that in my original post, which I’ll link below). It’s also important to remember that like, this process isn’t undertaken by one person sitting alone in a room. It’s a team with an established routine and established expectations from each other.

3. Who sent the episode to air. Some dub studios send out to air directly, some don’t. It’s more than safe to assume that yes, the script could be translated and Warner could never ever have it pass through their hands again before it went to air.

First, you mention that Guillermo Rojas MAY NOT have been the actor for Dean in 15x18, when he was, as it can be easily heard -if you can’t see the dub credits-, and he was only replaced for 15x19 and 15x20 because yes, he came up covid19 positive and while now is in the mend, when the episodes were dubbed he was quarantined and in recovery.

Second… I am sure you don’t mean any ill intent but calling dubbing “revoicing” is a little bit offensive. There’s a word for the process, that is dubbing, or in spanish, doblaje, and it comes from “Being a voice double”, which is a bit different from “redoing” the script which is what “revoicing” implies.  

Also, at least in my experience, if a company sends an episode to dub, and LATER does post-production in the episode? It’s the responsability of the company to send the new one and it WILL be changed by the dub studio. There’s no chance that they would keep a “wrong” version to send to air.

As per Guillermo Rojas’ interview, we know that WArner doesn’t check the dub after it’s done, as they don’t quite care. And I can say this also by experience, as I was a dub translator: The Client RARELY cares. You have questions? Though luck.  Some clients, like Disney, do keep a strict  on certain products (like, say MCU or the Muppets. MCU had a representative present during the dub to make sure no changes were made to the script, even if it was to make it sound better and less stilted, and the Muppets regularly get sent a reminder that names are to be kept in English, instead of using the original spanish translation names (like, for mexico, Rene and Figaredo for Kermit and Fozzie Bear).  But for series and anime? Translators are on their own. Hence why, for example, Valhalla’s Palace in Saint Seiya went through a thousand names depsite having only ONE translator, because sometimes it sounded like Waruhara, others like Warumara, and in general, it was very confusing.

As you said you were doing mostly by assumptions due to your research? That may also have been a reason for people waiting to see something more direct?

You did great, by the way, in terms of research if you don’t live in Mexico and had never seen translation work done. I loved your post, despite the little Revoice thing.

I felt bad for the SPN fandom/LGBT community and was trying to find as much info as I could, as accurately as I could and as quickly as I could to pull everything together. I read about two different actors--one of whom was Guillermo--who do Spanish voices for Dean. TBH I wasn't even sure at first which Spanish version of Supernatural had done the dub and I couldn't even find *that* bit of info for a while, so that added to my confusion. But in my defense I searched and searched high and wide for specifics, and it was really stupidly difficult to find what I was looking for just in terms of basic stuff (I can only assume that because I'm in the US and my default language on my computer is English, Googling about specifics of something like a show in another country--on websites that I suppose are largely in Spanish, or just on very different servers--just isn't going to pull up searches as specific as they might otherwise. I was actually somewhat bewildered that I couldn't find such simple information as which studio, exactly, was in fact responsible for the dubs (which I would think would be in the credits of the Spanish dub version, which I had no way to view), or even who the voice actors were for which countries.

In the end, I had to do a lot of "my best approximation" based on things like what some companies, like Netflix, leave out there in plain sight to be found regarding their process for translations.

I'm confused where our crossed wire was with versions. I was saying just what you said: that the odds of a dub studio messing up and sending a different version to air than what the final version made by Warner was would be, yeah, really unusual and not very likely. (But I know it had been widely speculated in fandom that certain footage may have been omitted, like maybe a whole scene, in order to suppress the LGBT element. I was trying to put people's minds at ease that it seemed unlikely.)

I'm sure people did want to see something more concrete, but at the time I was doing my research, there *was* nothing concrete, so I was doing my very best to try to find impossible things (like what the contractual stipulations might be between the different parties) to give heartbroken fans some basis of reality on which to speculate and theorize.

But yes, I found multiple studios that said that they did work for Warner with translations and other things, and I was even trying to find out which department of Warner was responsible for delegating that--right down to who might head the department, and was only able to find old info. Without being able to narrow things down any further I was only able to speculate going off from those sites of the places I found that *had* done work with Warner, and use them as a template.

Ok, so yesterday was a day. 

I am still reeling of a lot of it, which is why I have not been able to do a transcription of the panel (although the ones I’ve reblogged, made by other people, are very accurate and their only “fault” is not being in my head to know why I had some troubles translating Guillermo’s long answers as he spoke too quickly and too passionately so I had to paraphrase rather than translate literally as I did with the shorter answers, and at some points, I admit my short term memory may have failed me)

I am trying to get the panel off the facebook page to put it on my youtube (With permission from Harlecon’s organizer, Harleyquinnarts, whom you should all follow in Instagram and follow Harlecon on facebook because she’s amazing and made this possible by giving us the space to have the panel. BTW, I have heard that there IS a version already on youtube? If it is, please, please, please, put a link back to Harlecon on it, yes? These small cons deserve all our support)

I am ALSO trying to contact Adrian Fogarty, the dubbing director (NOT the translator, as some people are mis-reporting) who is, in the end, the one who has the answers as to where the hell the “Me too” came from.

Which is the missreporting I;ve seen going around, and which I need to adress.

During the panel, Mr. Rojas went from talking about the “Original” Script to the “DUB” Original Script without making it obvious that there was a different. Understand, for MOST actors, when they talk about the Original Script, they’re NOT talking about the Original English Script. They don’t get that. They get the Original TRANSLATED script, which can be then FURTHER changed by them or the director in order to fit cadence, and lip sync. 

And yes, we come again to my old nemesis, lip sync.

So he said that the original script said “Me Too”, as a reply to Cas’s “I love you”, and THEN Alejandro Fogarty, who has a TON of experience adapting on the fly, and is a very respected dubbing director, changed it to “And I you,Cas” because it fit better Dean’s lip movements.

This DOESN’T mean that Fogarty ADDED the Me Too. IT WAS on the Original DUB Script that Guillermo was reading.

He said that Dean didn’t reciprocate Castiel’s words too, but that was AFTER he said he didn’t HEAR what Dean originally said (Which, granted, could be him misremembering as he admitted he had a bad short term memory). This is not to say that he lied when he said Dean didn’t reciprocate, but that that’ts the reason why two different versions of what he said may be running around. This was when I said that then we had to ask Fogarty about the origin of the dub script “Me Too” as he’d probably be the one who knows.

He also said that while it was a surprise, that the writers had been very subtle creating the story between Dean and Castiel, and that it made SENSE. 

There are a few things I could say here about voice actor culture, but I won’t as it could muddy the issue and I want to wait until I finish the transcription.

What he corrected from my previous assumptions was that there was no Warner Bros quality control. They finish dubbing, then send it to air and as far as HE knows, there’s no WB exec checking the files. He admitted he might be wrong on that, but it’s more probable that he’s right. So IF the “Me too” was added, there would be no final check to stop it. HOWEVER, there has been no request to RE-Dub the line, so we can assume that, now that the horse is out of the barn, WB and CW don’t really care that, in Mexico and LataM, Dean Winchester is bisexual, canonically.

Which brings us back to the REAL question: Where did that Me Too came from?

Now, I want to make clear this I DON’T BELIEVE THERE’S A BIG CW CONSPIRACY TO KEEP DEAN STRAIGHT. What I do believe is that, due to a bunch of mismanagement of the series, PR, confusion of what their demography is, old-boys club mentality AND good ol’ network censorship, they may have ended up accidentally creating the ILLUSION of one.

And to be honest, I preffer to know the ACTUAL truth, which could very well be a rogue dub director (Which, if you check my previous posts, was a possibility I raised, that if there HAD been a rogue dub translator, the director HAD to be on it too), or a different audio version sent from the US.

I’ve seen script captures from the Original English Script that were leaked, and there Dean doesn’t reply ANYTHING. Not “Me too”, not “Don’t do this, CAs”. HE just goes 404,File not found, Being Loved by an angel, doesn’t compute.

So we know that DEan’s answer in english was Ad libbed by Jensen. 

However, we also know that Jensen had to re-record some lines. 

So he could’ve ad-libbed again, something different (Either by choice, or by the director’s request. I frankly don’t know nor care. I just assume that there were two different readings and the “wrong” one was sent to the Latam Translator. Wrong here to mean “not the one that aired in the US”)

And the only way we’re going to get closer to which was it, is asking the dub director, which is what I am trying to do. And I do hope that by now, you trust me enough to know that, IF the answer was “Oh, yeah, we decided that it was more logical” , I’ll tell you straight (Or, you know, organize another panel so that you hear it from the horse’s mouth just as I did with Guillermo Rojas)

Also, yes, Guillermo didn’t say the words “I ship Destiel” or “I am a Heller”. However, he DID say that the ending of the arc of Dean and Castiel having a love story was the closing of the series, that Dean reciprocating Cas’s feelings made it make sense and that it was beautiful. So he is a heller, in spirit if not in name.

I know that it’s long, and probably sort of dry, but it is informative. There’s no “rogue” anything in this situation. It all comes down to what the contractual stipulations are re: what has to be done in translation in terms of staying true to the script. There’s flexibility there; there has to be, because one language doesn’t usually translate super precisely to another. Which means that what happens in a dub and how those decisions should be seen after the fact (i.e. who deserves the blame) comes down to a few things:

1. Whether the dub script (the one in English, to be translated by the dub studio into the second language) was still “in production” (which means further changes might be requested from the studio after the episode is completely done being edited by Warner) or not at the time it was handed over to be translated. If so, you theoretically *could* end up with two different versions of the show, but the dub studio would be in big trouble if they effed up and sent a super different version to air by mistake than was meant to be sent. (I don’t just mean like, variations in word choice. I mean different footage etc.)

2. Whether Warner requested that the translated script be sent to them for approval (which, they would likely feel they shouldn’t *need* to if they were using a reputable company to do their dubs, because...those dub studios are only sinking themselves if they fail. And that shouldn’t happen. The network and studio likely have a very established relationship and have done this process enough times that they wouldn’t expect to have to babysit; if the translators had questions they could always ask Warner for clarification. Plus there are, again, contractual things that should stipulate which sorts of changes are acceptable. More on that in my original post, which I’ll link below). It’s also important to remember that like, this process isn’t undertaken by one person sitting alone in a room. It’s a team with an established routine and established expectations from each other.

3. Who sent the episode to air. Some dub studios send out to air directly, some don’t. It’s more than safe to assume that yes, the script could be translated and Warner could never ever have it pass through their hands again before it went to air.

Sherlock + Emojis